Earlier in the year when the LG G6 and the Samsung Galaxy S8 were unveiled, they came with rounded corners on their displays and, as we noted back then, apps like Cornerfly emerged swiftly on the Play Store to let users mimick that little look of the new devices. 5 months later, a lot has happened. We now have devices whose screens are not characterized by rounded corners but by the apparent lack of bezels. A smartphone from a company associated with the father of Android, Andy Rubin, the Essential phone, is leading the pack in this regard. Recently, a more high-profile device has made its grand entry into the scene and stolen the thunder off Essential’s first smartphone. That phone is the iPhone X.
The iPhone X, just like the Essential phone goes with a bezel-less design but since these are still phones, everything that makes them phones has to go somewhere after all. Which is why cut-outs exist on the top of both devices. In the case of the iPhone, “the notch” as it has come to be known, has attracted its fair share of criticism. Depending on which side of the fence you’re on, the notch could either be a unique design feature that was necessary to be able to get a bezel-less phone out of the door or a terrible failure on the part of Jony Ive and the other design experts in Cupertino.
The beauty of the Android platform is such that thanks to its versatility and somehow open status, developers are not limited in terms of how they explore their creative freedoms and add value to the ecosystem. We’ve seen it in how users are able to port features belonging to one particular device to many others where they weren’t meant to be or work in the first place. For the iPhone X and Essential phone’s cutouts, the same is happening.
If you’re one of those that regard the iPhone X’s notch stylish then a Polish Android developer going by the name Damian Piwowarski has got your back. Piwowarski’s new app, now available through the Play Store, serves just one purpose: to introduce that iPhone X notch to your Android smartphone.
A single toggle on the Smartphone upgrader 2017 app transforms, in an instant, an otherwise ordinary-looking, status bar to include a black area, where the notch would otherwise be if the device were the iPhone X, and little tweaks like rounded corners in the screen user interface.
Unlike the real iPhone X’s user interface which reorganizes itself to take care of the notch’s overbearing presence to properly display status bar items like network bars and battery percentage, it’s all messed up on this makeshift iPhone X that comes into existence courtesy of Piwowarski’s app.
While the application is mainly a “feel good” thing and nothing serious, it won’t hurt to spend 12 megabytes of data to download it instead of paying the head-turning $1,000 fee required to bring the real iPhone X home.
